A Very American Madness
America is not fallen; it is simply given to periodic bouts of insanity. The patient is tiresome; the patient is ridiculous; but the patient is stable.
Many conservatives fear for this country’s future—and for themselves. America—or at least progressive America—has lapsed from the family tradition, they argue. Swathes of the country repudiate religion, democracy, and patriotism. They root for terrorist organisations. They call for defunding the police and the elimination of traditional gender categories. Conservative expositions on America’s decline often read like sermons once preached in a Home for Fallen Women, the point of which is to allege that America has slipped into disrepute and become a discredit to its ancestors. Some conservatives even live in a state of panic, wondering how they will survive in the new order.
Yet theirs may not be the right reaction, as the correct analogy is not always a Home for Fallen Women but an insane asylum, and what is needed is not a sermon but a diagnosis. America is not fallen; it is simply given to periodic bouts of madness. The country has always been a little crazy. The patient is tiresome; the patient is ridiculous; but the patient is stable.
Unfortunately, reading newly published histories of America may cause one to miss this diagnosis, as history has become too archival. Today, a decade in a single century often comprises the work of a professional historian’s lifetime. Although careful scholarship and laboured research are the foundation of all good history, they often just yield raw material; they fail to capture the spirit of a country’s past, including what it was like to have seen that country and felt it. America’s longstanding craziness exists within that elusive spirit.
The works of Tocqueville and James Bryce are more illuminating, written from first-hand observation and with a foreigner’s eye that studied America in the light of the spirit of other nations. But they tend to ignore the delicate aspects of everyday life that caused so many visitors, then and now, to roll their eyes and sigh, “That’s so American.”
Fortunately, European novelists of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries visited America and left a record of our quirks. More like artists than pedants, they described the admirable in our country but also the ludicrous that exists to this day.
Not all Americans are crazy, of course, and while one can point to certain crazy qualities more widely distributed in America than elsewhere, one can scarcely find Americans who possess all these qualities. One American will have most of them; another, no less representative, may have few or none. Still, a longstanding craziness exists, and more than any recent moral decline, this accounts for much that is outlandish in our culture and politics.
Let’s start with what conservatives believe is the epicentre of contemporary American corruption: the university. Here, professors manufacture some of the oddest progressive ideas, such as turning criminals into victims, the notion that merit is somehow white supremacist, and that racism can help to explain automobile traffic and insomnia. Spoiled, self-entitled students lap up these ideas, with the recent pro-Hamas protests serving as a kind of ceremonial display for what is taught in some classrooms. All this seems shockingly new and revolutionary in American life. Yet on closer inspection, today’s university fits well within the tradition of American craziness.
Many of the pro-Hamas protests have occurred at east-coast colleges filled with east-coast students. Back in 1862, visiting novelist Anthony Trollope recoiled at the spoiled behaviour and strong sense of entitlement in many of the region’s children—an outlier by European standards of the time. At a hotel restaurant in Newport, Rhode Island, Trollope observed, “The adult infant lisps to the waiter for everything at the table … is very particular that his beefsteak at breakfast shall be hot, and is instant in his demand for fresh ice in his water.” As for his sister, when “the little precocious, full-blown beauty of four signifies that she has completed her meal—or is ‘through’ her dinner, as she would express it,” she throws her napkin down and abruptly leaves, her parents accompanying her as if they were “no more than her chief ministers.”
The cosseting continued as the children grew up. On his visit to America, Arnold Bennett, a popular English novelist at the turn of the 20th century, laughed at how an administrator at New York’s Horace Mann School would greet a visiting student’s mother: “The organization had foreseen her, had divined that the mother’s child was the most important among a thousand children—indeed, the sole child of any real importance… and was indeed the [school’s] main preoccupation.”
These children brought their spoiled and demanding natures with them to college. In 1910, Edward Steiner, a Hungarian Jewish emigrant who became both a novelist and a specialist on immigration, wrote about his experience taking a visiting German educator on a tour of an American college. The educator winced at the disrespect students showed their professors, but more peculiar was how so few of them seemed to be interested in study. Steiner himself admitted that the college president dwelled more on his “million-dollar plaything”—the athletic stadium—than on any teaching facility, looking “as some Caesar must have looked when he showed visitors to Rome his arena.” The students were no less derelict. The luxurious dorm rooms astounded the German educator, who asked the students how they could study in them. Naively and frankly, the students replied, “We don’t.”
When the German educator learned about all the outside activities that distracted students, things came into focus. American college was nothing more than “four years of more or less organized happiness,” he laughed. A student would have a “good time” (an Americanism he had just learned) where “his morals would be safe,” and, he added with a wry smile, “his intellect would be safe also.” In other words, the students would learn nothing.
More than a century later, little has changed. I taught at a college for more than ten years. Half the students wanted to study; the other half just wanted to have a “good time,” and like the children in Trollope’s account, they were used to getting their way. Up to 80 percent of college students don’t bother to read the assigned texts. Some college graduates have bragged to me that they got through four years of college without having read a single book.
This is ridiculous. It is also a short step to the progressive takeover of American colleges. Many of today’s students instinctively balk at study and eagerly latch onto ideological constructs instead, which some progressive professors happily teach. Compared to acquiring real knowledge, the constructs can be picked up with little effort. Identifiable by catchwords and slogans, they are sometimes grouped under the august name of “theory,” as in postcolonial theory or critical race theory, but they play the same role as SparkNotes and ChatGPT in the life of an indifferent student: they are useful, albeit somewhat dishonest, shortcuts that bypass the need for the slow and tedious work once required for true comprehension.
Students defend this education by emphasising that they have been “taught to think” rather than forced to memorise boring facts. To demonstrate, they apply ideological constructs to current events, and the ease with which they do so is offered as evidence of their education’s value. Again, this is all typically American. In 1940, visiting French writer André Maurois was already complaining that too many American college students specialised in contemporary political questions before learning anything of history or general culture. Rather than waste their time reading old books filled with seemingly useless philosophy, student protestors, then and now, believe an ideologically oriented education to be more useful and efficient, more applicable, and even more businesslike than what a traditional college education has to offer. It “gets results,” as visiting Europeans often observed Americans saying.
Add in several more longstanding features of American craziness and the pro-Hamas college protests become even more understandable. First, many pro-Hamas protestors chant “From the river to the sea,” even though they don’t know which river or which sea they are chanting about. This is odd, but in American craziness, enthusiasm more than understanding is the point. Visiting America in the early 1920s, English writer G.K. Chesterton noted: “Now that is where the American is fundamentally different. To him the enthusiasm itself is meritorious. To him the excitement itself is dignified.” He added, “[The American] counts it as part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise from a bed of sickness for something, or possibly for anything.” Although many pro-Hamas protestors know little about the Middle East, they are proud of their energy; they are proud of their excitement. Americans, Chesterton observed, “admire people for being impressionable. They admire people for being excited.” It is the American’s “whole morality to be keen,” he explained.
Second, the protestors call for the destruction of the American way of life, yet wear masks because they don’t want to ruin their chances of getting a job and enjoying that way of life. Chesterton observed similar behaviour a century ago. Radical Americans in his time condemned the American economic system but also wanted to get rich and live comfortably by that system. “The march to Utopia,” he observed, “the march to Earthly Paradise, the march to the New Jerusalem, has been very largely the march to Main Street. And the latest modern sensation is a book written to show how wretched it is to live there.” Soviet humorists Ilf and Petrov witnessed the same craziness during their visit to the country in 1935. While on the road, they met an angry young socialist who wanted to confiscate all wealth—but only above five million dollars. Why above that particular amount, they wondered? Because, they soon realised, this young man wanted to succeed and make his own five million dollars.
Third, the pro-Hamas protestors were often ridiculously juvenile, chanting phrases in the style of nursery rhymes, taking selfies, and playacting the victim, all while thinking their behaviour would fix or at least influence the world’s problems. Such childishness is nothing new in America. Ilf and Petrov teased that the American reformer is often so carried away by his primitive ideas for progress, so eager that injustice should disappear of its accord and that everybody should be happy, that “he did not even care to think how all this should come about. He was a child who wanted everything to be made of chocolate. It seemed to him that all he had to do was to ask kindly, good-natured Santa Claus, and everything would be magically transformed.” Millions of Americans are in the throes of such childish ideas, they wrote.
In 1906, during his visit to America, English novelist H.G. Wells wrote of the average American attitude toward its colleges: “Much of that busy world still regards a professor as something between a dealer in scientific magic and a crank, and a university as an institution every good American should be honestly proud of and avoid.” Little has changed.
The civil-rights movement was a real political movement. In contrast, “ESG investing” and the effort to “defund the police” are fads, which explains their lack of staying power. The popularity of a fad spreads quickly; a curious halo of solemnity surrounds it; but unreality soon leads to its demise. It doesn’t “get results.”
Fads are an integral part of American craziness. In his 1932 book A Private Universe, André Maurois wrote, “Americans take up ideas just as they take up a fashion in shoes.” He went on to say, “But the American tires of systems as quickly as he becomes infatuated with them. His intellectual fashions are very fleeting.” Americans are particularly susceptible to fads, he noted. The French, he explained, have “a certain common sense, a traditional mistrust” of ideas, while the English remain sane through “a splendid indifference and deep contempt” toward ideas. But in America, “freshness of mind is greater and curiosity more naïve;” hence their greater susceptibility to fads.
Nor should the bizarre content of some of today’s progressive fads surprise. The crazier the content, often the more likely it is to catch on. Maurois wrote, “Burn the idols of other men, and idolize what they have burned. Criticize America ferociously. There will be violent reactions; they will help your ephemeral fame. The newspapers will quote your words. You will be famous, and three months later, forgotten.”
An American fad often tends toward madness, declared Chesterton. “Indeed, it is not only mad, but it calls itself mad,” he said. During the 1920s, reformers who successfully pushed hygiene on American children “proudly added that the children were ‘health-mad’,” he wrote. Praising these children for being mad about their health seemed almost too ridiculous to be ridiculed, he said, as madness is the antithesis of health. People who berate the police while criminals attack them, or who invest their life savings for reasons other than profit, behave analogously. Such people are justice-mad—and, to their minds, proudly so—only their madness is the antithesis of sensible justice.
An American in Chesterton’s time risked jail for drinking a beer, because of Prohibition; in our time, he risks job loss for an expression of unconscious bias. What underlies the fad’s power in America and the petty tyranny it inspires? Chesterton blamed America’s longstanding tendency toward religious sectarianism, where people search for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. By way of illustration, he described an American religious sect that had separated itself from the main branch when some adherents believed it was immoral to wear buttons. The sect then subdivided when several of its members invented a new objection to ribbons. He envisioned the sect subdividing again when a few rebels disapproved of trousers because of the existence of trouser-buttons. This deeply ingrained tendency toward sectarianism is the primary method of progress in America, he argued. Americans believe “each secession in turn must be right because it is recent, and progress must progress by growing smaller and smaller.”
This is also progressive theory, Chesterton observed, which is the enemy of both democracy and sanity, for democracy says the majority is always right, while “progress says the minority is always right.” Even when the cause of the progressive minority is crazy, it is new, and respected for that reason alone, as newness taps into the American people’s “faith in the future”—another fad. The majority, in turn, fear contradicting it, for in an inversion of ancient Chinese ancestor-worship, Chesterton said, they fear contradicting their own great-grandchildren, who they imagine living in a time when the minority position has become the majority. In this way, a small group of progressive American zealots successfully transform their crazy idea into a popular fad. Only the idea’s unworkability keeps it from becoming permanent.
The effort to ignore differences in biological sex exemplifies this odd American dynamic. A small but vocal group holds this position. The majority hesitates to criticise it because the group is small. Small groups are thought to pave the way toward progress; there is a sort of sanctity about the minority. Because the small group is also new, it is assumed to be more in touch with the future. Although representing the majority, many doubters fear the condemnation of later generations if they resist the idea. Only hard reality, such as injuries suffered by biological women in full contact sports, prevents the idea’s complete takeover.
Doriane Lambelet Coleman
Fads in American politics are also rooted in how Americans view the world. According to H.G. Wells, average Americans see the world in fragments; to them, it is “a multitudinous collection of individual ‘stories’—as the newspapers put it.” He continued, “If one studies an American newspaper, one discovers it is all individuality, all a matter of personal doings, of what so and so said and how so and so felt. … Not a touch of abstraction or generalisation mitigates these harsh, emphatic, isolated happenings.” In other words, many Americans engage politically in response to a personal anecdote that moves or repels them.
How a personal story takes hold of people’s minds and launches a political fad is as mysterious as the birth of a religion. Already filled with an obscure religious-like sentiment and a vague yearning to discover a “higher meaning” in life, the American grows obsessed with the personal story and the political idea connected with it. He looks everywhere for confirmation of the idea, while turning away from all evidence to the contrary. Then the herd instinct kicks in, as others identify with the same story. Even when he is alone, the herd is there within him, reinforcing the idea. The idea spreads to hundreds, thousands, millions, passing like an intoxicating vapour; a casual spark starts a forest fire. The fad is born—and with enormous effects. Maurois declared in My American Journal, “The art of governing this country [America] consists in provoking, or simply using, brief flashes of national emotion.”
The fad of progressive identity politics is built on this tendency. The word “identity” itself has more value than meaning in today’s politics; it asks more than it answers. The American grabs on to a personal story, identifies with it, counts himself into the story, observes himself in the act, and turns his feeling of identity into a simple sensation. Put another way, the story returns him to things through which he has lived, giving him a “faith in himself”—in his own experience—which becomes as much a fad as “faith in the future” once was.
When Ilf and Petrov said political ideas in America often do “not exceed the level of the average Hollywood picture,” it was not simply because they thought Americans simple-minded. They also realised that Americans strongly relate to the stories they hear. The stories give them what their own life stories fail to provide: a way to understand their own position in the world and a way to feel like constituents in a larger collective process. It is why, Ilf and Petrov suggested, experts who craft real solutions to problems are often ignored in America, while celebrity actors and athletes get all the attention. Experts create policies but no personal stories. Celebrity actors, on the other hand, convey personal stories on screen, while professional athletes are the personification of individual success stories.
Little has changed since the 19th century. Trollope saw identity politics play out in the American West while speaking with a supporter of John Fremont, the tough, violent military officer who massacred Native Americans and later thumbed his nose at his superiors, and who ran for president in 1856. “He’s a frontier man and that’s what we want,” said the Fremont supporter, who seemed to identify himself as a tough man in his own right. “They won’t meddle with Fremont. They are beginning to know in Washington what stuff he’s made of,” he continued. Somehow Fremont’s personal story made everything in the world as simple and understandable to this man as things were in his own home. From which Trollope began to understand the difficult task American politicians faced.
In 1904, Russian novelist Vladimir Korolenko, who had visited America a decade before, found himself aboard a ship talking to an American from Illinois. The American’s politics so confused him that he wrote about the encounter.
The American, he reported, went on an antisemitic tirade worthy of any prejudiced Russian of that era. Another Russian participating in the conversation naturally assumed the American would support all the antisemitic measures the Russian government at the time had taken, such as opposing equal rights for Jews and establishing a special zone outside of which they would not be able to settle. The American was shocked. “How in the world have you reached such a conclusion?” he asked coldly and severely. “But... you dislike the Jews heartily...” the Russian said, confused. “It is true that I dislike those people, but it doesn’t follow that I want their rights restricted...” the American replied.
Such cognitive dissonance sounded crazy to the two Russians. Yet such craziness was widespread in America, Korolenko admitted. As a case in point, he noted how most material printed in American newspapers was ridiculous, and meant to satisfy an American reader’s “thirst for sensation” with “petty interviews.” But suddenly, a newspaper’s tone would “became deep and significant,” and echo the voices of the Founding Fathers who had established freedom. The trashy and the august were like two inseparable sisters standing hand in hand at all the byways of American culture, whether in the newspapers or in an individual American’s mind. Such co-existence made no sense to Korolenko.
The craziness persists to this day. During an appearance on Alex Jones’s InfoWars podcast in 2022, American rapper Kanye West suddenly announced, “We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.” But West and Jones were also keen to remind viewers that they certainly didn’t want to take anyone’s rights away. As Korolenko observed a century ago, among Americans, “love is capricious … but justice, justice is obligatory.”
The long tradition of American craziness should reassure American liberals that there is no need to panic when they hear racist and/or conspiratorial ideas espoused by the far-right. There is something peculiar about America that European novelists noticed over a century ago, and that somehow keeps such racism and conspiracism from slipping into mass-murder and fascism. And that same American craziness should offer similar reassurance to American conservatives who panic over extremes on the progressive side.
For example, the witch hunt that grew out of the #MeToo movement seemed to presage an era in which American women would gain supreme power over the lives of men. Conservatives feared it heralded a new and revolutionary change in American culture. But it didn’t. #MeToo extremism was just another short-lived fad that grew out of old American craziness.
In the 1860s, Trollope laughed at the immense power women had over men in America. A woman on a train in New York “ignores the whole world around her … she speaks as though to her, in her womanhood, the neighbourhood of men was the same as that of dogs and cats,” he observed. In his novel, He Knew He Was Right, one of the characters is an American man-hating feminist, whom Trollope calls a “republican virago”—a common American type, he says—who tries to sway a healthy English woman to the feminist cause and keep her from marrying. American women were so supremely powerful, Trollope observed, that men kept their distance from them in public spaces. Even from three thousand miles away, while safely in England, Trollope himself experienced the male fear of American women, as he begged their forgiveness for some of the things he had written earlier, pathetically pleading, as if on his knees, his hand shielding his face, palm facing outward, that maybe he was just a little right?: “And those ladies of New York; is it not to be confessed that they are somewhat imperious in their demands?”
Most European writers who visited America over a century ago observed the same phenomenon. “The [American] woman does not really regard men as citizens but as children,” wrote Chesterton. The American woman “seems to rule everything,” wrote Steiner, citing the findings of a German Royal Commission. The wife of the German educator whom Steiner had escorted commented, “America certainly is a Paradise for women, but it is “Die Hölle” [‘hell’] for men.” The extreme element in the #MeToo movement had deep roots in this odd state of affairs. In the end, the extremism turned out to be just another American fad—an American tradition in its own right. Conservatives need not have panicked.
Today, many conservatives feel hatred, fear, and panic toward progressive America. But these are not always the right emotions.
From one direction, the threat that appears to come from individual progressives actually comes from impersonal forces of change, such as demographics, technology, and capitalism. For example, many social conservatives hate progressives for destroying the culture of chivalry toward women, such as opening a door or giving up a seat for a woman. Yet chivalry can only prevail in a society where men and women are nearly always kept apart by work and their respective modes of life. That ended not by the hand of any progressive but because technologies created through capitalism diminished the need for male strength, which in turn allowed women to enter the workforce in much greater numbers. To “hate” this development makes no sense. It is like hating a tree branch that falls on you. The branch has no agency—and neither do demographics, technology, or capitalism.
From the other direction, as this essay suggests, the threat that appears to come from radical progressivism often has its roots in longstanding American craziness. What conservatives face is not some monster never before seen, nor some alien creature with mysterious powers, but a homegrown absurdity—an old wine poured into new bottles. That absurdity must be resisted and opposed in many cases, of course, but not with feelings of fear, surprise, or panic. The threat is too familiar to evoke such feelings. If anything, the threat should be resisted with a sigh (we’ve seen all this before), with a sense of humour (our craziness is a comic disease), and a shake of the head.
During his visit to America, the English novelist Aldous Huxley wrote to his friends in Europe, “Some day you should come and explore this very strange country. … I had no idea, till this summer, of the depths of its strangeness.” For Americans, even American conservatives, that strangeness is what we call home.
